In recent yearsjazzhas entered into all kinds of unlikely marriages with classical music. Bach, Mahler and Bartok have all been pressed into service. Until now that mystical dreamer Karlheinz Stockhausen seemed beyond jazz’s pale, partly because jazz can boast quite a few mystical dreamers of its own. But there’s also the problem that Stockhausen didn’t compose the kind of music you can 'riff’ on. To put it bluntly, his pieces don’t have tunes.

Apart from one. In the mid-1970s Stockhausen composed Tierkreis, a set of twelve pieces inspired by the Zodiac, which undoubtedly has tunes. They’re touching in a way that combines awkwardness and grandeur, as if superior beings from outer space were trying to ingratiate themselves with humanity by writing something catchy. What makes them odder still is that they were composed for musical boxes.

For Bruno Heinen, remarkable jazz pianist and composer, these pieces are part of the family. Thanks to his cellist father, who worked with Stockhausen, four of these musical boxes are in his possession. We saw them perched on the grand piano at this performance of his new cycle of twelve pieces, based on Tierkreis.

He and his Sextet launched off with Aries, and proceeded round the Zodiac. First impressions were not encouraging. A musical-box tinkled into life, and Heinen inveigled his own piano musings into the sound. Then the left hand came into play, Andrea di Biase joined in on bass, and suddenly we were in a straightforward jazz gig, with pleasingly warm harmonies.

This was a problem, because Stockhausen rejects 'warmth’ of that kind. To hear his otherworldly musings layered on top of a familiar if very expert post-bop idiom was deeply disconcerting. Fortunately the gig rescued itself over the following star-signs. It was as if the players collectively wakened to the deep strangeness of Stockhausen’s music, and recreated it in their own terms. In Scorpio, the three melody-line players James Allsopp, Fulvio Sugurta and Tom Challenger brilliantly recreated Stockhausen’s stark, jagged invention in their own terms. Andrea di Biase’s solo at the beginning of Sagittarius teased out 'hidden’ high sounds in the bass’s normal deep sound, in a way which Stockhausen would have admired. By the end, when Aries came round again in an elaborate new version, the territory between Stockhausen and jazz — which at first had seemed uninhabitable — had turned out to be big, and fruitful.